On Retrogaming ­ Articles ­ On the Stick

On Retrogaming

I’ve read a couple of seemingly anti-retrogame articles recently and it’s got me thinking. The first was written by Dennis Scimeca over at Joystick Division. That one asserts that old games are essentially just that, old, and have no place amongst all the shiny new games we have now because they lack some cultural relevance that Citizen Kane has decades later. Fortunately, his cohort Garrett Martin wrote a pretty good comeback. The more recent is a piece by Joel Goodwin over at Electron Dance. It’s the last in a long series about his history with games and seems to assert that the only value in old games is for us older gamers (whatever the fuck that even means, I’m in my twenties, goddamnit) to relive our childhoods. The games aren’t actually that great, it’s just our rose-tinted nostalgia goggles that make them seem good.

I’m calling bullshit on both of these arguments right now. The second has more validity, but I’ll get to that. The former is kind of insulting, honestly. Really, though, the whole thing pivots on the continuing belief that games aren’t art or literature like films, music and books. If someone wrote an article asserting that Citizen Kane isn’t really that good because it uses outmoded filmmaking techniques, they would be laughed off the internet, even by the author of the article I mention, who specifically defends the film (although I’m sure some troll somewhere has done it). If someone wrote that the only reason people think the Beatles are good is because all the people who like them were young in the ’60s and are just trying to recapture their youth, the scoffs would be hear ‘round the world. Games, though? Fair game, apparently.

Looking around, it seems awfully odd for this argument to be coming up now. In a way, it’s a backlash to the massive 8- and 16-bit nostalgia that’s taken hold in many twenty and thirtysomethings in recent years, which is understandable, but look at some of the most ubiquitous and popular games of our time. Angry Birds is a 2D, character based puzzle game. Farmville is an online-enabled Harvest Moon. These are games that almost everyone, whether they consider themselves a gamer or not, is aware of and has probably played. Sure, Call of Duty makes more money, but it also costs more by several orders of magnitude.

How is that not culturally relevant? If I can draw a direct line from Mighty Bomb Jack (a 2D, character based puzzle game) to Angry Birds, is that not cultural relevance. The idea Scimeca puts forth that old games are too primitive to have that relevance is shattered by a look at nearly any successful iOS game. They show direct lineage to vintage games. Doodle Jump has more than a little in common with Q-Bert, Game Dev Story is a lot like Aerobiz.

Now, to Goodwin’s point, it’s hard to argue that nostalgia doesn’t have its place. Retro Game Challenge was critically acclaimed (despite selling sadly few copies) for its ability to capitalize on your nostalgia. On the other hand, the people came for the presentation and stayed for the games, which were done in the style of NES games. Even more to his point, though, there are some games I’m happy to defend out of pure nostalgia. Is the NES port of Double Dragon any good? No. It’s arguably among the worst versions, but I like it because it was the first version I played (and was very confused by the title, let me tell you) and I associate it with my childhood. On the other hand, I never played VICE: Project Doom until about a year ago. It’s an NES game I missed, but when I played it, I found it to be a woefully underappreciated 8-bit gem. I could not have nostalgia for it, because I never played it as a child. And yet, I still enjoyed it.

Certainly, there are technological limitations that make some games more difficult to go back to, but they mostly revolve around progress and are easily solved via emulation, either legitimately (Virtual Console) or nefariously (ZSNES). Not everyone has all day to sink into Super Mario Bros. 3, which has no password or save feature. That’s fine. Not everyone has the patience for games with limited continues (I think I’ve made my opinions on that issue known over the life of this site). That’s also fine. With emulation, save states solve literally ALL of these problems. They can also break a game wide open, but that’s up to the player to use them judiciously.

Again, I return to previous examples. If someone argued that Casablanca didn’t have a good story because the composite shots look awful, you would think they are insane. By the same token, arguing that Contra isn’t infinitely playable (and you can take that from someone who’s training for a World Record run at it) because the graphics are outdated and flicker a little is insane. It’s easy to pick up, the controls are simple and the game can be finished in about thirty minutes, even by an unskilled player. Most notably, it’s frantic and it’s fun.

Now, I’m also not interested in lambasting new games to boost the old. There are a lot of new games I love. I own all the current consoles except the 3DS, which has more to do with my finances at the moment that my feelings on 3D gimmickry. There’s a lot to love about new games, but new games aren’t all sugar and spice. My fiancee won’t play modern console games because she says “the controller scares me.” Modern big-budget games are off-putting to people who haven’t played games, because the controller may as well be the Lament Configuration.

There’s room for all games. The real concern I have is that articles like Scimeca’s make me worry. The medium has a history, both in terms of its art and gameplay. We don’t have a London After Midnight, but without people who do care for retrogames, we might someday. So while you should love Angry Birds and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, don’t forget VICE: Project Doom and River City Ransom.

8 Comments

My wife teaches kindergarten and for the past few years there have been kids in the class who told her that one of the Donkey Kong Country games was one of their favorite games. There’s no nostalgia involved when you’re 5 or 6.

Also, thanks for mentioning Mighty Bomb Jack. That is a great game and doesn’t get nearly the credit it deserves.

You’re certainly right (as I admitted in the comments following my article) that not everything in the past has “rotted away” due to design/interface problems. Some games in their original form certainly can endure, although I do wonder if they will continue to endure.

There was something of a double backlash in my last pieces of WWCF. “Nothing To Lose” was a shot across the bows at the retro nostalgia yet “The Last Dream” scratched away at the chink in its armour to reveal a personal, festering wound: an admission that there’s a fundamental, emotive reason for retro love that no amount of rational debate will argue away (but certainly not all, as you yourself point out).

Here’s another thing: I feel the home computer years get less retro air time than the 90s SNES/Sega years – why would that be? There is far less interest in Atari home computer games.

Thanks for adding to the debate! I’ll add a comment to the article to link to your counterargument.

Also forget to mention one more point! The use of emulators’ save states to make old games more palatable puts us on dodgy ground (already dodgy as we’re using an emulator rather than the original hardware).

You’re not playing what was intended: so can we really say they were classics?

Chris, I don’t think that argument works. When it comes to music, all that’s important is the audio itself. Clarity and perfect stereo can make a difference but fundamentally do not alter what you’re listening to.

I wrote: “I would counter that the element of interactivity is more problematic: given the choice most Facebook users wouldn’t want to go back to the days when they had to write individual letters to friends on paper. New game design makes old design feel slow and frustrating.”

Many games in the 80s restricted you to three lives and didn’t even offer extra lives. You can fix this by using an emulator to save your progress and remove the frustration – but isn’t that missing the point that the original game is “unplayable” in a modern context without changing what it is? Interaction is the key thing that separates games from other media, its principal component – can we really hack around with that and still say it is the same artefact? This is more a conservational/philosophical point but as it was the kind of space my piece was laid out in, I think it is sound to raise it here.

“Here’s another thing: I feel the home computer years get less retro air time than the 90s SNES/Sega years – why would that be? There is far less interest in Atari home computer games.”

I guess my first guess would be that, at least here in the states, those Atari computer games (and C64 games, and ZX Spectrum games, etc.) didn’t sell nearly as well in the US as console games did. But pick up an issue of UK mag Retro Gamer, and half of it is old microcomputer games.

As for your emulation argument, would you then say that Nintendo adding a save feature for Super Mario Bros. 3 in All-Stars is somehow cheating? My point is that the games are still good, the fundamental play mechanics work, but passwords are annoying, limited continues were intentional out of fear of kids beating the game in a rental and I’m not a kid who had five hours to sit and plow through a game that won’t allow me to save anymore.

I’m not sure Chris’ argument is on, as I’d liken it more to movies. I watched a lot of movies on VHS back in the day. The audio warbled, the picture was shitty, the aspect ratio was just wrong the vast majority of the time, but the movies were still good. It’s not the technology’s fault the format had limitations.

And, for the record, I record all the footage for videos on this site with the actual consoles and I prefer to play my games on a TV in their original format, but sometimes… sometimes Zelda II. Sometimes Ninja Gaiden III. Sometimes, the technology or the business made something besides the gameplay suck. And sometimes I cope with an emulator.

Atari was much bigger in the US than it was in Europe and it was always fighting a losing battle (Atari were terrible at PR) here.

The NES was part of the “third generation” consoles emerging mid-80s which revitalised console gaming after the crash. Still we’re talking about 5 years of home computers (sharing the limelight with the Atari 2600 which had absolutely dominated and continued to be sold right through into the early 90s) which then overlapped the third-gen into the late 80s. So I find it interesting that a lot of retro looks back to the third and fourth generation of consoles and not as much to their precursors – one data point that does come to mind is VVVVVV which is inspired by early 80s home computer platformers. And of course Ian Bogost is a big supporter of the 2600 heritage.

I have no real problems with emulators themselves but games of the 80s and many into the 90s do suffer from problems such as difficulty and repetition. Games I thought were fabulous are now less so, they simply do not stimulate. And I went through a shedload of them recently. (Again, not everything: I still found Interactive Fiction exciting.)

I followed up Dennis Scimeca’s article after you linked it. “This feels uncomfortable in and of itself, but also raises the specter of an even darker question: at what point will video games ever reach a place of permanent relevance?” I see concern here less disgust at the oldness of things. I don’t see it as attacking retro more of a sadness at his realisation that games with old design techniques are simply not enduring as we’re configured for more efficient playthings now – and that this means, as cultural artefacts, they are in more in danger of “being lost” than movies or music.

Whether you agree with that premise, I guess, is the crux of the thing. As I put forward in “Nothing To Lose” I don’t think as medium we’re losing very much at all, but I see his perspective.

I’m probably not going to go on about this much more =) I’m pretty exhausted by all the heavy 80s gaming research I’ve been doing for the past three months.

I think there’s a lot of 2600 nostalgia around, but I think the massive library of the system is also an issue. The fact that there are less than 700 official NES titles makes it easier for there to be fewer that everyone remembers. The fact that Atari didn’t have the kind of licensing agreement with publishers Nintendo had means that there are nearly 2000 (!) Atari VCS games in existence. It makes it much harder to have shared experiences besides the huge hits (Space Invaders, Combat, Pitfall!, etc.).

And, again, I certainly agree that many games don’t hold up like they used to, but if you listen to our SNES Game Draft podcast from a couple of weeks ago, the theme that keeps coming up is “great ideas from the 16-bit era that went un-ripped off.” There are a lot of creative mechanics that never came around again, and I think that’s valuable, even if it’s a little iffy how they were executed.